Hawk Wings » snippets

Snippets plugin for Google Quick Search Box

Tim Gaden — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:47:15 +0000

QuickSnippets is a new plugin for Google Quick Search Box (QSB) that adds basic snippet management to the utility’s toolbox.

It is easy to use and quite clever.

First get the plugin from the developer’s Github site.

Copy the plugin file to your ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Quick Search Box/PlugIns/ directory, and restart QSB.

Then to add a snippet, all you need to do is activate QSB and type quicks and select the QuickSnippet Regist option:

Enter the trigger and the snippet itself into the dialog box:

I’ve found that cutting and pasting blocks of texts into the snippet box preserves the line breaks when they are activated later.

When you’ve entered all the snippet you want, dumping them into an email message or other document is easy.

Just activate QSB, and type the snippet’s trigger. The snippet appears in the list below:

Select it and hit Enter. All done!

Obviously it’s not TextExpander, but for a lot of people it might be all the snippet management you need.

QuickSnippets is freeware and comes with more copious instructions in English and Japanese. google, google quick search box, plugins, snippets, text, productivity, not apple mail, not mail.appSimilar Posts:

Using Snow Leopard’s built-in text snippets in Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:12:29 +0000

Text snippet apps like TextExpander or TypeIt4Me or Typinator can boost your productivity enormously, saving time and wear-and-tear on fingers. After Mail Act-on , TextEpander is the most valuable tool I use in order to Get Things Done fast.

Not many people know that Snow Leopard now offers a system-wide “text substitution” feature that does the same job as those snippets managers.

It doesn’t work in all apps (like, sadly, TextMate in which Hawk Wings is written and its code tweaked), but it works in mail.app, although it is turned off by default.

To turn it on, you need to open a new Compose window in Mail. Then select the Substitutions option from the Edit menu:

The “Show Substitutions” option opens a dialogue with all the options:

“Smart Dashes” will automatically replace two hyphens with an em dash; Smart Links automatically hyperlinks email addresses and URLs; “Smart Quotes” makes your quotation marks curly.

The “Smart Copy/Paste” option in the Edit menu automatically decides whether a space needs to be added or not to anything you paste into a message.

Text Replacement is what we are interested in. Check it and then click the “Text Preferences” to open up the options in System Preferences:

Here you can select some pre-made snippets and insert your own. I’ve added some of my email addresses, and my work email signature.

There are two ways to get the line breaks that you need for longer snippets like email signatures. Either press Option-Return at the end a line, or type it first into TextEdit, and then cut and paste the text into the expansion field on the right.

From now on, every expansion you trigger when typing an email is saving you time.

Enjoy the feeling. Use the extra time to get your inbox to zero , then go and spend some time with your kids. Or failing that, drinking buddies.

UPDATE: In the comments, Phil provides a link to a macOSXHints tip that lists some Terminal commands to unlock text substitution in more Coca apps. (Sadly, not TextMate though.) Thanks! productivity, mail.app. apple mail, text snippets, snippets, textexpander, text substitution, text replacement, working to live not living to work

[This post was much improved by reading Rob Griffith's post on MacWorld ]Similar Posts:

HTML snippet file for TextExpander

Tim Gaden — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:32:17 +0000

20/20 hindsight is a marvellous thing. One of the biggest mistakes in my life, in retrospect, was taking Latin instead of typing at school. I didn’t see the Internet coming.

I may well remember that all Gaul is divided into three parts (Mr Thompson, I salute you!), but it takes me a long, long time to tell anyone else about it in an email or document.

Luckily TextExpander saves my bacon hundreds of times a day. After Quicksilver and MailTags, it is the third biggest time- and finger-saving app on my Mac.

With just a few keystrokes, I can (at lightning speed) dump my mail signatures, frequently-needed URLs, often-typed chunks of HTML code, torturously long institutional titles and much more into almost anything I am typing in Mail.app and elsewhere. (Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame has some actual examples to hand.)

The PR department at SmileOnMyMac kindly emails to tell me about a new ready-made collection of HTML snippets.

When you have imported them, typing “,a” will automatically expand to . As you can imagine, this kind of thing saves bucketloads of time every day.

You can get hold of these 60 snippets either by themselves or rolled into an earlier collection of 100+ common typos that TextExpander can recognise and correct on the fly.

TextExpander is not the only way to do this nor the cheapest (shareware — USD 29.95) but for ease of use — res ipsa loquitur!textexpander, textpander, productivity, snippets, saving time, text, HTML, mail.app, apple mailSimilar Posts:

Clever TextExpander clipboard snippet trick

Tim Gaden — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 10:20:32 +0000

The makers of TextExpander, a very clever time- and finger-saving snippet utility, have posted a nice tip on the company’s blog.

It explains how to make a “smart snippet” using TextExpander’s %clipboard variable, which is replaced by whatever is currently on the clipboard when the snippet is typed.

The original author of the tip uses it to create Amazon affiliate links for his blog on the fly, but obviously it has wider uses too.

For example, imagine you run a blog that attracts a lot of emails asking how to do this, that or the other thing.

You can quickly run up a snippet like this:

Then, when the emails start to arrive, all you need to do is navigate to the link, copy it to the clipboard and then type the snippet into the reply:

Suddenly more of your life is your own. Clever.

If I sat around here long enough I’m sure I could think of a dozen other applications for this tip, but you might have more fun thinking them up for yourself.

TextExpander costs USD 29.95 and is available from the developer’s web site .textexpander, textpander, productivity, snippets, shortcuts, tips, helpful apps, clipboard, mail.app, apple mailSimilar Posts:

TextExpander: Update, Tips and Tricks

Tim Gaden — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 11:45:57 +0000

TextExpander, the utility formerly known as Textpander, has been updated.

The new version (1.4.1) fixes problems with abbreviations involving the Option key, describes named delimiters (space, tab, return, esc) properly in languages other than English and includes several other minor bugfixes.

Merlin Mann at 43 Folders uses this update as an opportunity to share some tips on the ways in which he uses the app to save time and fingers.

Also, TextExpander’s developers have posted a great suggestion from Timothy of Ohio on grouping shortcuts into contexts with distinct initial characters. Clever.

TextExpander costs USD 29.95 and is available from the developer’s web site .textexpander, textpander, productivity, snippets, shortcuts, tips, helpful appsSimilar Posts:

Textexpander 1.4: Flexible delimiters, old logo

Tim Gaden — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 22:24:07 +0000

TextExpander, formerly known as Textpander and my third favourite time-saving app in Mail.app and elsewhere, has been updated.

The new version includes an option to use the old Textpander menubar icon, which according to the release notes has “quite a few vocal fans”.

User-definable delimiters (the keystroke which triggers the expansion) help you to simplify your workflow:

For example, I currently use spacebar for TextExpander expansions and the tab key for TextMate snippets. I could now change the TextExpander delimiter so that my “muscle memory” only has to remember one key for all expansions.

TextExpander 1.4 also offers better importing of snippet lists and the ability to sort snippets by the date they were created or last modified.

TextExpander is shareware (USD 29.95) is available from the developer’s web site .productivity, mail.app, apple mail, snippets, text, textpander, textexpanderSimilar Posts:

TypeIt4Me 3.0: Loads of new features

Tim Gaden — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 11:40:28 +0000

TypeIt4Me is a snippet and text expansion utility like TextExpander (once Textpander).

These utilities speed up the typing in Mail.app and elsewhere to an unbelievable degree, and save me more time than anything else except, perhaps, Quicksilver.

Version 3.0 which was released yesterday is a major update. It is now a universal binary and its user interface has been completely rewritten in Cocoa.

Major new features include support for Rich Text Format in snippets and the clever ability to make individual snippets active only in particular apps.

The interface is clear and can be grasped as once by anyone who has used TextExpander. The preferences pane shows some of the app’s other features:

It can now import clippings files from TextExpander and Typinator and offers nested snippets, the ability to wrap the contents of the clipboard within a snippet improved support for images in snippets and more.

Devoted productivity nuts will be glad to know that they are no longer restricted to 2,700 abbreviations.

I noticed something else excellent straight away; TypeIt4Me does not suffer the occasional one or two second delay that afflicts TextExpander. Nice.

TypeIt4Me is shareware (USD 27) and a 30 day unlimited demo is available from the developer’s web site .snippets, text, productivity, typing, give your fingers a break, textexpander, typeit4me, text expansion Similar Posts:

TextExpander bargain today on MacZOT!

Tim Gaden — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:18:11 +0000

One of my very favourite time-saving, finger-sparing, productivity-boosting apps is on sale at MacZOT! today.

You can pick up a copy of TextExpander, the text snippet manager, at a 33% discount.

Nothing else helps me whip through my inbox as quickly (I don’t use MailTemplate) or manages my signatures as well in Mail.app and elsewhere.

On sale. Just for today. USD 19.95 instead of USD 29.95.

Drop everything. Go get it .

[Thanks, Marcel]textexpander, productivity, snippets, apple mail, mail.app, text, shortcuts Similar Posts:

StickyBrain is no more

Tim Gaden — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 09:49:43 +0000

Chronos announced in an email today to registered users that StickyBrain has been discontinued and will be replaced by another of the company’s information management apps, SOHO Notes.

SOHO Notes is built from the same code base as StickyBrain but features three additional functions:

SOHO Notes can synchronize notes between multiple computers using a .Mac account.
SOHO Notes can access multiple note databases simultaneously.
SOHO Notes is multi-user capable which means users can share notes with others over a network using the product’s client/server technology.

The two apps cost the same (USD 39.99) and Chronos is offering free transition to existing StickyBrain users.

According to the Vice President of Sales at Chronos, Jerry Halls, the move streamlines the company’s software catalogue:

SOHO Notes is like a big brother to StickyBrainâ€”it does everything StickyBrain does plus more. In order to simplify our product line and bring more focus to our SOHO Series of products, we feel that now is a good time to move our users from StickyBrain to the more powerful SOHO Notes.

Earlier this year Hawk Wings was very impressed with Yojimbo, Bare Bones’ new information manager, and switched from StickyBrain.

It then watched with interest as Chronos appeared to incorporate many of Yojimbo’s features in a subsequent release of StickyBrain.

As a result of today’s change, Chronos now offers an information manager at almost the same price as Yojimbo, but with stronger multi-user and network features. yojimbo, stickybrain, information management, productivity, PIM, notes, snippets Similar Posts:

RapidoWrite: Accelerate your typing

Tim Gaden — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 13:13:13 +0000

RapidoWrite is a snippet manager like TextExpander.

It allows you to store text strings that you type repeatedly and to insert them into your typing with ease and speed. I find that these apps make me much more productive in Mail.app and elsewhere.

The Preferences set-up will be familiar to users of Text(Ex)pander:

Through it, you enter your frequent text strings and an abbreviation to identify them.

When you are typing, a pop-up window appears when the app’s input manager recognises a matching keystroke combination:

If you have several snippet with abbreviations that begin with the same keystrokes (as above) it offers you all the options.

Its great advantage over TextExpander is its cost—it’s free.

However, unlike TextExpander it only does text. Support for images is planned for a future release, the developer says, but for the moment TextExpander has the edge.

RapidoWrite is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, snippets, textexpander, text strings, typing acceleration, productivitySimilar Posts: